[Gluster-devel] gluster, gfs, ocfs2, and lustre (lustre.org)

[Brandon Lamb]

On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 9:30 AM, Brandon Lamb <brandonlamb at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 9:21 AM, Shaofeng Yang <syang at incando.com> wrote:
> > Can anybody share some thoughts about those cluster file systems? We are
> > trying to compare the pros and cons for each solution.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Shaofeng
>
> Tought question as it depends on what you are needing. Myself I have
> messed around with 3 of those for the last 2 years, so far I am still
> just using an 2 NFS servers, one for mail and one for web for my 14 or
> so client machines until I figure out how to use glusterfs.
>
> I tried gfs (redhat) and I dont remember if I even ever got it to
> actually run, I was trying it out on fedora distros. It seemed very
> over complicated and not very user friendly (just my experience).
>
> OCFS2 seemed very clean and I was able to use with with ISCSI but man
> the load on my server was running at 7 and it was on the slow side.
> What I was trying to do with it was create a single drive to put my
> maildir data onto (millions of small mail files). The way it worked
> was you actually mounted the file system like it was a local file
> system on all machines that needed it and the cluster part would
> handle the locking or whatnot. Cool concept but overkill for what I
> needed.
>
> Also I believe both GFS and OCFS2 are these "specialized" file
> systems. What happens if it breaks or goes down? How do you access
> your data? Well if gfs or ocfs2 is broken you cant. With glusterfs,
> you have direct access to your underlying data. So you can have your
> big raid mounted on a server and use XFS file system, glusterfs just
> sits on top of this so if for some reason you break your glusterfs
> setup you *could* revert back to some other form of serving files
> (such as NFS). Obviously this totally depends on your situation and
> how you are using it.
>
> I have never used lustre, it sounded cool, but over complicated.
>
> Hence the reason that *so far* I am still using NFS. It comes on every
> linux installation, its fairly easy to setup by editing what, 4 lines
> or so. GlusterFS takes the same simple approach and if you do break
> it, you still have access to your data.
>
> The learning curve for glusterfs is much better than the others from
> my experience so far. The biggest thing is just learning all of the
> different ways you can configure spec files.

I just wanted to add the stressing of simplicity.

When the *#($ hits the fan, I would much rather be fixing something
that is on the simple side from the start, rather wondering what the
### is going on with a specialized filesystem and all the extra pieces
it adds and not having access to my data. That is what my company
finally decided on. I was looking into buying iscsi hbas and seeing
about upgrading our network, using DRBD and OCFS2 to sync our two RAID
servers and after two weeks we just looked at each other and said, you
know what. NFS may not be the most kickass thing or lightning fast, or
have builtin replication, but it WORKS. And if a server failed well it
would suck but we could copy from a backup onto the other nfs server
and be running again.

This is the reason I am down to only investing time into glusterfs.
Its simple but powerful! It does all kinds of cool stuff, and if the
worst happens, Im not really all THAT worried because I know I can
still get my files and have a SIMPLE backup plan.